Day: July 28, 2018

Mars has a low atmospheric pressure compared with Earth, and that makes it a dusty place. Storms occur frequently, and the warmer months are notorious for them, as hotter temperatures and rising air currents lift particles from the surface. Sometimes, though, the phenomenon goes global. Several dust storms developed in April and May and over…

A decommissioned Titan II intercontinental ballistic missile sits in an underground silo at the Titan Missile Museum in Sahuarita, Arizona. This 25-ton blast door leads to a once-secret nuclear bunker built for members of Congress beneath The Greenbrier, a four-star resort near White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. This sign marks the spot of the former…

This week marks the one-year anniversary of Equifax’s very terrible, no good data breach that impacted 147 million Americans. We took an inside look at all the steps the company has taken since then to shore up its defenses—and whether it could possibly be enough, given the scope of the damage. And speaking of damage,…

In 2014, a graduate student at the University of Waterloo, Canada, named Cohl Furey rented a car and drove six hours south to Pennsylvania State University, eager to talk to a physics professor there named Murat Günaydin. Furey had figured out how to build on a finding of Günaydin’s from 40 years earlier—a largely forgotten…

We’re deep into the dog days of summer, and this weekend, a lot of us are planning on hiding inside to escape the heat. If that sounds like a great weekend plan to you too, then you’re in luck. Together with our pals at TechBargains, we’ve compiled some of this weekend’s most intriguing deals, from…

The Polity series by English science fiction author Neal Asher is a limitless thrill-ride of grotesque aliens, badass hardware, rogue AIs, and deadly secret agents. It’s got everything a science fiction fan could want from an action-adventure story, and that’s definitely by design. “I wanted a universe—a future history, if you like—big enough to tell…

If your interests include hardware scuttlebutt, smooth rides, DJ Khaled’s truly adorable son Asahd, the future of urban mobility, Instagram, and DJ Khaled himself, have we got a story for you. Yesterday, the “No Brainer” producer posted a two-minute promo clip, hyping his participation in Beyonce and Jay-Z’s ongoing “On the Run II” tour, his…

BEIJING — The women recount being forced into sex by bosses and trusted co-workers. They speak of being shunned by friends and discouraged by the authorities from pressing charges. They recall being told their lives would be ruined if they spoke up. In gripping open letters posted on social media sites, more than a dozen…

On Thursday, the Pentagon opened bidding for a huge cloud computing contract that could be worth as much as $10 billion. Given its size, the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract, known as JEDI, is alluring for major cloud computing companies that might not normally do much business with the Department of Defense. Announced in March,…

A whole lot of books on the brain are published these days and you can read yourself into a coma trying to make sense of their various messages. So it was with my usual low-burn curiosity that I starting reading The Mind Is Flat by British behavioral scientist Nick Chater. At least the title is…